On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 01:27:05PM -0700, Shane Hathaway wrote: > > I agree that bash is frequently easier, but its documentation is > scattered and IMHO bash is much more prone to bugs. Even the earlier > one-liner has a significant bug; it will fail if the path happens to > contain a space.
In this case, you're lucky to have an obvious solution. Sometimes you just can't do it in Bash. I spent a long time once trying to run a command with a dynamically built argument list--something like this: argument_list="arg1 arg2 arg3" some_program $argument_list Unfortunately, I could find no way to execute a program with a variable length list of arguments. The following works, but requires a fixed number of arguments: some_program $arg1 $arg2 $arg3 The original discussion was about whether to use a shell scripting language or a general purpose language. I've personally found that shell scripting is incredibly convenient for simple tasks, but that general purpose languages are usually more robust. If I need to build a simple pipeline, I'll use Bash. But if I need to do something special when a pipe breaks, I should use something like Python with the Subprocess module. -- Andrew McNabb http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/ PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55 8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868 /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
